We continue with my personal reminiscences of Cold War Vienna with a look back at one of my favorite posts ,first published on May 29, 2010 Vienna Rathaus or City Hall Vienna was my Paris. From the late 1960s through the 1980s I made it my home, my workshop, my personal museum. I became a ..read more

A bit of a summer break for me. So, here’s another reprise from Cold War Vienna, orignally published in 2010.  In the beginning was the word. Well, one cent a word, to be exact. Or sometimes twenty-five cents for a column-inch of them. And we all know that a picture is worth a thousand words. But with my newspapers that was literally true: ten dollars per each 5×7 black and white shot. Hemingway developed his terse, adjective-free style writing cable dispatches from the front lines of the early twentieth century. I developed a flatulent, baroque style on the front lines of padded per-wor ..read more

Bigot List: A Reckoning has just been released to good reviews, such as this 5-star from a Readers’ Favorite critic who called it a “rollercoaster ride of espionage, mystery, betrayal, and murder. … a page-turner, I was hooked from the start...” This international thriller is also the subject an interview on The Big Thrill, the online magazine of the Inernational Thriller Writers. And for the month of July, you can get this ebook, or the ebook for my previously published The Cry of Cicadas: A Byrns on the Homefront Mystery, for just over a dollar at Smashwords. Happy summer reading ..read more

David Bell is the New York Times bestselling author of a number of suspense novels. His latest, Storm Warning, is released on June 25, 2024. Bell is a professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. His other novels include Try Not to Breathe, She’s Gone, The Finalists, Kill All Your Darlings, The Request, Layover, Somebody’s Daughter, Bring Her Home, Since She Went Away, Somebody I Used to Know, The Forgotten Girl, Never Come Back, The Hiding Place, and Cemetery Girl. Storm Warning, is one of those edge-of-the-seat novels ..read more

I am super excited to get this book out to folks. Loved writing it, and as I reported earlier, if you like a good old-fashioned espionage thriller with black hats (except who is a black hat?) vs white hats (ditto), suspense, and hard-hitting action blended with a stop-your-heart love story, an unlikely comradery, and foreign destinations, then, yeah, I think you’ll like this one. BIGOT LIST comes out June 25, 2024 at its normal price of $5.99, but until then you can now pre-order the e-book at Bigot List: A Reckoning for just $2.99 (about the price of a fast food taco or burger and I guarantee ..read more

From April 4, 2011 by Scene of the Crime | Edit I have been writing this blog for fourteen years and there are now a couple hundred posts of author interviews and personal reminiscenses. From time to time I want to share some of the older posts. Here is one of my personal favorites. I was listening to NPR the other day, huffing away on my elliptical, and there was a short review of a new edition of C.P. Snow’s classic, The Masters, part of his Strangers and Brothers sequence of novels. God, how I loved those books when I first read them. However, I was so callow at the time as ..read more

After decades of publishing with mainstream houses in NYC, London, and Germany (incuding Penguin, Dutton, Holt, Macmillan, et al), I had it up to here with delays and double thinking and who should be telling what kind of story. And for sure those publishers probably had it up to there also with this midlist author who never broke out of midlist. So, onward into self-publishing. Mr. Gutenberg, who started it all Such an easy bravura statement, but man, can it be a pain. I had totally forgotten after all those decades of mainstream publishing how much I hate one aspect of the writing game: self ..read more

An ex-CIA operative, now a comfortable history professor, is drawn back into the old game and to a former lover when he discovers his name on an online hitlist. If you are in the mood for a good old-fashioned international thriller with white hats vs. black hats, secret agendas and hidden conspiracies, then you will love this book. Bigot List will be coming out in late May from Werthen Press. Watch this space ..read more

If you were one of the several thousand people who entered a Goodreads giveaway last month to win ten signed copies of The Cry of Cicadas and came up short, you have better odds this time, but only until the end of April. We’re giving away 100 ebook editions of this “immersive journey into the tumultuous era of WWII, filled with rich historical detail and compelling characters to delight fans of well-penned mystery,” as a Readers’ Favorite reviewer described it. The giveaway, available to Goodreads members in the U.S., began on April 4 and runs through the end of this month. Joining the cont ..read more

Camilla Trinchieri is the author of the Tuscan Mysteries series, launched in 2020 with Murder in Chianti. This series features the former NYPD detective Nico Doyle, who has left detective work behind, moving to the Italian hometown, Gravigna, of his deceased wife, Rita, and hoping to find some peace. The village is in the Chianti region, and Nico, half-Italian and half-Irish, slowly builds a new life working with Rita’s relatives. But soon he is also pulled back into the world of policing, recruited by the local Maresciallo, or marshal, Salvatore Perillo, to aid in a murder investigation in qu ..read more